As an autodidact, I really appreciate that the big "brand-name" universities do this. MIT OpenCourseware and the free Stanford lectures have been so incredibly valuable in making me an at-least-half-decent engineer.
I've written a Scheme interpreter a few years back, but never a compiler, so this should be a pretty fun time-dump for the weekends.
I especially like when courses are not watered down. For instance, many coursera courses are simplified to be accessible to a broader audience with limited background. When I want to dig deeper, I really enjoy some of MIT opencourseware classes.
Can you recommend any MIT ocw courses that are challenging while being high quality? Some of them don't have video lectures or are quite hard to follow without TA/teacher help, that I've been hesitant to try them out again.
I did three graduate classes.
- Distributed systems. 6.824 (There are two versions. the labs changed over the years).
- Operating systems: 6.828. Operating systems
I mainly did the labs. In 6.828, you program a full OS kernel (JOS, based on provided source code). In 6.824, one project was a user-space distributed file system in C++, another was a distributed reliable key-value store in Go.
I agree that the course material is hard to follow without external help but it's definitely doable. They have automatic grading scripts and the labs are progressive.
I have no illusions that this is likely to happen, but if I ever hit it big, the first thing I will do is donate a good chunk of change to educational programs like MIT OpenCourseware. It is extremely generous to make this stuff freely available, and has contributed immensely to my ability to educate myself.
I've written a Scheme interpreter a few years back, but never a compiler, so this should be a pretty fun time-dump for the weekends.